Dorothy said they couldn’t just go home as if nothing had happened, that they needed a drink. They all ended up at the Gage. Sword pretended to think about options other than alcohol, but Dorothy ordered vodka, which started a chain of requests for spirits. Olivia went with mezcal, Dan scotch, Marianne cognac, Artie tequila, and Phil (as Sword did in the end, too) ordered bourbon. Jo asked for a glass of milk, but that was only to be weird—she didn’t touch it.
Phil had never had bourbon before. It was the only American liquor he could think of. He didn’t think it was cultural appropriation to drink a margarita (his favorite drink), but he also imagined that he would get teased for having one. Olivia would say something about Mexican identity, how he was stealing from her ancestors (her maternal grandmother was from Jalisco). Or maybe no one would notice, given that all the attention was on Artie. Artie, the hero, who’d called the police.
“We all assumed they’d been warned by the system,” Sword said.
Artie wasn’t too comfortable with the “good job” looks. He was glad that Vivian Reeve hadn’t joined them for a drink, but soon she would start talking. People would find out he’d been listening to Jurassic Park’s theme while on the toilet. Artie knew it didn’t matter what he said now, what bravery points he managed to garner preemptively: no amount of preliminary work would ever make up for the image of him people would have once Vivian talked.
“Vivian was crying,” he said. “I didn’t know what else to do.”
“You call the cops every time a woman cries?” Marianne asked.
“Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do now?” Artie said. “Turn yourself in? On behalf of all men?”
Dan and Olivia laughed. Jo said Artie’s response would have been funnier if he’d stopped after “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do now?”
“I didn’t realize we were still workshopping me,” Artie said.
“We’re always workshopping you.”
Phil wasn’t liking his bourbon much. He envied Artie’s tequila. Artie was barely drinking it.
“Vivian thought I was the shooter,” Artie said.
“So did I!” Dorothy’s vodka was making everything interesting to her. The vodka, and the fact that Manny had left her a message. She felt like a teenage girl—not the one she’d been herself, but a cliché version from the sitcoms, the girl a boy’s attention turned to goo in the high school hallways. Dorothy wasn’t in love with Manny (she wasn’t sure she’d ever been), but that such a famous man had inquired about her safety and well-being made her feel important. That didn’t happen often.
“I thought you were coming after me specifically,” she told Artie.
“Why would I come after you?”
“Because I was mean to you in class the other day.”
Dorothy wasn’t supposed to say things like that. Never question your teaching methods in front of your students was the rule. If you were not proud of how a class had gone, you either forgot about it or found a way to tell yourself the kids had learned something from the fiasco. In that way, teaching was different from performing. The audience shared part of the responsibility.
“I sucked,” Artie said. “I deserved every bit of what I got.”
He made a solemn promise to never shoot Dorothy. He said he would probably never shoot anyone, honestly. He didn’t see that in the cards for himself.
Olivia was the first to order a second drink. She went outside to smoke before it arrived, and it hurt Artie a bit that she couldn’t help it, even as they were talking about him. He saw her, through the bay window, struggle to light a cigarette in the wind, and kept watching as a young man immediately stopped to help her out. She hadn’t put a coat on, and the man opened the sides of his own in front of her, in a flasher-like posture, to create a windless pocket of air. Artie thought the man would leave once the cigarette was lit, but even though he didn’t smoke one himself, he stuck around to chat with Olivia in the cold. Perhaps Olivia’s whole life was like this, Artie thought. Good-looking men stopping by to solve her problems. Was he not going to be one of them himself in thirty minutes? Driving her to O’Hare?
Phil saw him look. Phil had decided not to date or fall in love again for a while. When people asked about his love life, he joked that it didn’t make sense for him to start a serious relationship before he was famous, because his fame would ruin it, create an asymmetry impossible for the couple to ignore. The official line was he didn’t want a woman he loved to see the change in him—there would be a change—but in truth, Phil simply hadn’t had the courage to go up to a girl and introduce himself lately, wait to see if she was interested. He didn’t know what made him interesting anymore.
The fact that he wasn’t on any dating apps had led his classmates to accuse him of asexuality, and even once, after Jo had read out loud from an LGBTQ+ glossary that was circulating on campus, of demisexuality (a demisexual being someone, they’d all learned that night, who could only sleep with people they were in love with). Phil had said that he wasn’t demi-, or a-, just your run-of-the-mill cisgender white male, a phrase he’d seen Dan and Artie wince at. Phil understood why cisgender white males didn’t like hearing the words “cisgender white male.” He’d been like them not so long ago. He’d hated being reduced to his skin color, gender, and sexual orientation. He was so much more than that! A redhead! An epileptic! A volunteer at a homeless shelter! A gifted pianist! But then he’d heard someone say that gays and lesbians had been reduced to their sexuality since forever, and people of color to their color, so why should he have a problem with it? That had gotten him thinking. He’d never heard it put so simply. Why shouldn’t he suffer the same indignities as people he was no better than? His parents hadn’t agreed. They’d argued that what white people were getting wasn’t “privilege” but the basic decent treatment everyone should receive, that white people were experiencing the baseline that society should strive to have minorities experience as well, and that what people like Phil were doing was going to get everyone treated equally shitty rather than equally well. It was certainly a nice idea, raising minorities’ treatment up to the level of straight white people’s, but Phil didn’t think it could work, or not quickly enough, and anyway, he believed that in order for true equality to be achieved, cis white men and women needed to understand what it was like to be narrowed down to broad traits that they didn’t think said much about them. That’s why when someone called him a white male, he didn’t mind cringing a little bit: it was part of his education.
As interested as he was in thoughts of fairness and equality, though, he still found them hard to make funny. His poor timing in becoming socially aware right before he was accepted into stand-up school was funny in itself, he knew that, but he was growing wary of self-deprecation. You had to be careful not to go too far with it. Phil knew it was possible to hurt other people by talking shit about yourself.
“How’s your tequila?” he asked Artie, still jealous of it.
“Do you want it?” Artie said. “I’m only having a sip or two. I have to drive Olivia to O’Hare.”
He was still staring at her through the restaurant window, smoking and chatting with the kind stranger.
“What’s your plan here?” Phil said.
“My plan?”
“With Olivia.”
“We’re going to pick up her sister,” Artie said.
“And?”
“And then we’ll bring her to the Empty Bottle for the show tonight.”
“Don’t be thick,” Phil said. “You’re going to be alone in your car with her for like an hour. What are you going to say?”
“Don’t encourage him to prepare lines,” Jo said. “That’s lame.”
“Professor Sword here has lines prepared for when he dies,” Dorothy said. “He and his wife, they’ve picked their last words together. Isn’t that sweet?”
Was she drunk already? She shouldn’t have said that. Sword had told her about the last words in a moment of vulnerability, when he thought he might have to use them. Why was she ridiculing him now? It was the Manny effect, Dorothy thought. It was Manny’s voicemail, contact with Manny, even indirect contact with Manny. It made you cocky. It made you stop thinking before you spoke, because you were confident that you would find a way to make what you said hilarious midway through saying it. But she had nothing.
Sword was staring into his bourbon. He just wanted to be home, watching a movie. It was Dorothy who’d insisted he join them at the Gage.
“How can you already know what you’ll want to say about your whole life?” Artie asked Sword. “I don’t even know how I’ll feel about today when I go to bed.”
“That’s because you’re still young,” Sword said, and for a moment, it seemed he wouldn’t say more than that. “You don’t know yet which of your choices will pay off, so everything is high stakes. It’s all high highs and low lows.” Another pause, a sip of bourbon. “With me, it’s different. I’ve gone through the main steps already, career, marriage, kid…I expect things to roughly remain on the same plane from now on. Perhaps a slight incline toward the end.”
“That is so sad,” Jo said.
“I understand how you could see it that way,” Sword said. “But really, after the constant stress of your twenties, the self-doubt of your thirties, and the anguish of your forties, it’s nice to relax a little bit. It’s like biking down a hill now.”
“You’re making me want to kill myself,” Jo insisted.
Another student telling Sword that he made her want to die would’ve had him apologizing for minutes. But the comedy students never complained about anything to the hierarchy. It wouldn’t cross their minds to write to the dean about Sword making them feel this way or that. It was like they didn’t know deans existed.
Phil asked Dorothy if she felt the same, that the stakes became lower as she aged, or if what Sword was talking about was rooted in male privilege.
“Well, I’m not married,” Dorothy told Phil. “I’m not even dating anyone. I have no children. And I’m trying to teach you guys something for a living. How fulfilled do you think I am?”
Dorothy was being pretty anti-feminist, Phil thought, linking personal fulfillment to marriage and children, but he wasn’t going to touch that. Some things only women were allowed to say.
“I might be barren, for all I know,” Dorothy added. “I’ve never even had an abortion.”
“I don’t think it’s a male thing,” Sword said. “That life gets easier in your fifties. Look at Manny Reinhardt.”
“You’re using Reinhardt as an example of non–male privilege?” Phil said.
“I’m just saying, here’s a man who could’ve just taken his leisurely ride through fame and glory, but then, boom: violence, accusations of emotional misconduct.”
“I’m not sure where you’re going with this,” Jo said.
“He’s trying to make you feel better,” Dorothy said, “by showing you that life can be eventful and suck at any age.”
“Manny Reinhardt’s life sucks?” Phil said. “Excuse me? What about the women he abused?”
“Abused?” Dan said.
“You really drank the Kool-Aid,” Jo said.
Which was something Phil’s parents told him all the time: “You drank the Kool-Aid, son.” But they’d drank some kind of Kool-Aid too, in their day, hadn’t they? Wasn’t that what being alive was, to some extent, participating in society, drinking whatever it gave you? Otherwise, you were on the sidelines your whole life? Otherwise, you were a misfit? “But I don’t understand,” Phil’s father would say to that. “Don’t you want to be a misfit? Isn’t that what you went into comedy for?”
“And you,” Phil told Jo. “You’ve internalized male domination to the point that you’re siding with it. You’re okay with turning your back on your whole gender.”
“You don’t even know my gender,” Jo said. “I just made it up in my head.”
“All right, kids,” Dorothy said. “That’s enough. Keep some anger bottled up for tonight.”
Phil obliged, and kept to himself what he wanted to tell Jo, that she was a conservative, and that there was no problem with being a conservative as long as she realized how unoriginal a position that was for a comedian to occupy. Comedians were always looking to ridicule the new thing, the new vocabulary, the new phrases. That was expected. But wasn’t there a way to incorporate the new without the latency period of calling it stupid? His fellow students all blamed the times for declaring certain topics off-limits, but wasn’t that exactly the kind of challenge a great comedian should want to tackle? Taking his or her or their intelligence for a spin along the new edges, the new limits? Except he couldn’t find a way through it all yet. He’d been thinking about Aristotle a lot since Sword had had them read his Poetics in class, a text in which the Greek philosopher promised that after speaking of tragedy, he would offer his thoughts on comedy and an explanation of what was funny, only to never mention it again. The world had agreed to assume that Aristotle’s thoughts on comedy had been lost, but the more Phil thought about it, the more he believed the man had never written them. He thought it would make a good bit, too: Aristotle persuading his friends and colleagues that, yes, he’d written the comedy part, but couldn’t quite remember where he’d put it—“dog ate my homework” type stuff. Phil liked to imagine that Aristotle could’ve been like him in some way, struggling over comedy, ultimately not knowing what to say.
Olivia came back from her cigarette break and asked what she’d missed.
“Phil isn’t too happy that Reinhardt is coming here to teach,” Dorothy said, and as everyone’s eyes turned to her, she understood that she had delivered news.
“Reinhardt is coming here?” Olivia said. She was beaming. “I thought undergrad protests had canceled his class?”
“Kruger didn’t tell you?” Dorothy said. “He was supposed to make the announcement in workshop.”
She was slightly worried about Kruger. When they’d gone back to the classroom for their bags, the kids had noticed he’d left his phone behind. The oversight had disturbed them more than his leaving without a word (who willingly went anywhere without his phone?). It had bothered them so much that Dorothy had had no option but to make fun of the kids. They wouldn’t have made it for a day in the eighties, she’d said, but the truth was, she didn’t know how long she’d make it there herself, if someone decided to send her back without her phone. She would probably try to smuggle it on the trip.
“I can’t believe we’re going to meet Manny Reinhardt!” Olivia said.
Artie had never seen her so happy.
“I don’t know how comfortable I am with this,” Phil said. He turned to Sword. “Is the whole department behind Reinhardt’s hire?”
Jo, who’d been making tight little balls of her paper napkin, threw one of them in Phil’s face. It bounced off his nose and landed in his bourbon.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she said. “Why did you apply to this program at all?”
Jo threw another paper napkin marble, which again ended up in Phil’s glass.
Dorothy’s phone rang.
“Speak of the devil,” she said, flashing her screen to the table so everyone could see it was Manny calling her again. She’d saved his number right away. What’s wrong with you? she berated herself as she made her way to the bathroom to take the call. Why so proud?
Her “hello” echoed against the bathroom’s marble counters. Manny was on a plane to Chicago, he said, calling from the first-class cabin. On a plane to Chicago? Dorothy’s heart did the opposite of skipping a beat. Two quick ones bubbled up when there should’ve only been one. Had her email worried him that much? Did he like her more than she thought? Would he want to turn the plane around when she told him the active shooter situation had been a prank?
He knew the active shooter situation had been a prank. He was coming to see his son.
“Of course,” Dorothy said.
“It’s really last minute,” Manny said. “I haven’t told him yet that I’m coming.”
He said perhaps Dorothy could see where he was going with this. He didn’t want to impose on his son. He was wondering if Dorothy had a place where he could stay tonight, for a few nights, even, maybe. Like a guest room?
“I would go to a hotel,” he said, “but I’m trying to lie low these days.”
Dorothy didn’t immediately have an answer for him. She couldn’t readily picture the layout of her apartment. It was her old place that came to mind instead, the one in New York City. No guest room there. Barely room for herself.
“Whatever you need,” she said after a few seconds, after it all came back to her—her walk-up in Ukrainian Village. “I have a guest room. I even have two bathrooms! You won’t have to see me at all!”
“Well, I want to see you,” Manny said. “I wouldn’t be asking if I didn’t want to see you.”
“Right.”
Dorothy looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. Who would want to see that?
They exchanged practical information. Dorothy would be out when Manny landed. She had to go to the students’ show.
“You should meet me there,” she said.
Manny wasn’t sure it was a good idea.
“You’re going to have to show your face eventually,” Dorothy said. “Maybe this is the perfect occasion. Friendly room. Young comedians and friends of young comedians. Could make you look good.”
“Could make me look like a creep,” Manny said. “Showing up in a club full of twentysomethings.”
“These are going to be your students next month. You’re going to have to be around them. If you come see them perform tonight, it’ll show that you’re taking teaching seriously. It’s a good look. Just don’t flirt with them, okay? Don’t ask anyone to marry you.”
“Wait, what? I can’t even ask you?”
Dorothy tried not to think too hard of the way he’d meant “even,” not even her.
“Not even me,” she said.